The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University presents No One is Forgotten: An Immersive Opera Drama on February 7 at 7 p.m. and February 8 at 2:30 p.m. in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. The work is the first live performance of a tale of intimacy, surrender and the will to survive. A soundscape of foley arts, actors, electronics, instrumentalists, and classical vocalists creates a world where the audience can experience storytelling through experimental psycho-acoustic sound design techniques and their imagination. The opera tells the story of a journalist and an aid worker who are being held captive; no one knows where they have been taken or if they are alive—all they have is each other. Free and open to the public, tickets can be reserved through University Ticketing. The Wallace Theater is fully accessible with an assistive listening system. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
No One is Forgotten: An Immersive Opera Drama is based on Winter Miller’s 2019 play No One is Forgotten and inspired by true accounts; Miller is writer of the opera’s libretto. Like the play, the opera brings the audience into an unknown place where two women, Beng, a journalist, and Lali, an aid worker, are being held captive and are struggling to maintain their humanity while stripped of everything, relying only on one another. The story is surprisingly funny, moving, and relevant to today’s headlines. Instead of what might be two performers, the drama is divided between two actors and two vocalists to mine the duality of what it is to be physically held captive while emotionally escaping through music. Two very different composers transform the play’s theatrical form of silence and physical gesture into a rich, revealing soundscape. The performance deals with adult subject matter and may not be appropriate for audiences under the age of 13.
Photo used on the concept album for No One is Forgotten: An Immersive Opera Drama from the premiere of the original play at The Rattlestick Theater. Photo credit: Paula Court
In addition to Miller, the creative team includes co-composers Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey, Princeton faculty member Elena Araoz as director, and Mila Henry as music director and conductor. Eve Gigliotti is creative producer and co-executive producer and Cath Brittan is executive producer. The design team includes Lucas Corrubia as sound designer with E.M. Jimenez and Jon McCarthy as assistant sound designers, and Princeton junior Jenna Mullin as lighting designer, with foley design and sound effects by Shirey, performed by Nathan Repasz; stage manager is Rose Tablizo. The cast includes Ellen McLaughlin and Gigliotti as Beng and Amelia Workman and Brandie Inez Sutton as Lali, with Jeffrey Zeigler as cellist.
Gigliotti, mezzo-soprano, has performed with companies including The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, Pittsburgh Opera, Tanglewood Music Festival, San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and The Glimmerglass Festival. Her first major producorial project, No One Is Forgotten: An Immersive Opera Drama, came about after Gigliotti attended the premiere of the original play by Miller at Rattlestick Theater in the summer of 2019. Looking for modern, relevant ways to infuse theatrical storytelling with opera, Gigliotti was inspired to have Miller’s words set to music. Six months later, while the world was locked down for COVID, artists were scrambling to make work that could reach people in their faraway corners. The story that Miller created rang with even more relevance, notes Gigliotti. She gathered a group of creatives, including composers Prestini and Shirey, to develop the idea of forming this work into an operatic hybrid, using cross-collaborative storytelling techniques, actors, opera singers, foley, and cello. “With the alchemy of a classic radio play,” said Gigliotti, “the work relies on the power of sound to reach distant audiences and bring them together.”
Gigliotti connected with Araoz, a professional director, actor, writer, and a senior lecturer in Princeton’s Program in Theater and Music Theater. Since the pandemic, Araoz has been researching and experimenting with alternate forms of theater and opera through her project Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, which has been archived at the Library of Congress. She is currently inventing new technologies for art and music-making.
In 2023, The Dallas Opera, Lexicon Classics, and Gigliotti co-commissioned the full work and recorded and released as a concept album designed in 3D spatial surround sound, currently streaming on all major platforms. Araoz directed and designed the immersive audio for the album.
Now, the work is being produced as a live operatic theatrical event, maintaining the format of a radio play but with live immersive sound design and psycho-acoustic sound techniques with the intention of transporting the audience into the world of the characters.
“Our goal is to bring the audience into the confined dark space, simulating where the characters are being held, using sound technology to further enhance the relationship the audience has to the circumstances of the characters,” notes Gigliotti. “By using experimental techniques, sound designer Lucas Corrubia and director Elena Araoz will attempt to deliver each audience member a unique sound experience, entirely their own, depending upon where they are placed in the space of the theater. We’re interested in how far this technique can be pushed, and how we can create both an individual and collective experience for each witness to the story.”
Among the technologies the team is experimenting with are newly invented speakers developed for the project.
Miller notes she was compelled to write the original play because she observed how much more dangerous the world has become for journalists over the last 20 years, such as the tragic murder of journalist Daniel Pearl.
“The mission of this piece is to continue hostage advocacy,” notes Gigliotti, “and recognize that all are engaging in new types of captivity—the fear of ICE, children separated from their parents and locked in cages at border crossings, prisoners, trafficked bodies under lock and key—No One Is Forgotten asks the question: ‘If you were deprived of your freedom, how would you survive?’”
Following the February 8 performance, a discussion on “What Art Can Do That Journalism Cannot” will feature Eliza Griswold, Director of Princeton’s Program in Journalism, and Aleksandar Hemon, Professor of Creative Writing.
The project team is eager to share this unique theatrical experience and to prototype the live performance of the work with an audience and to gather audience feedback. The cast and creative team are currently rehearsing at Coffey Street Studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, as artists in residence. They will move into the Wallace Theater on the Princeton campus on February 2, setting up and experimenting with the sound equipment and creating the aural environment, leading up to the performances on February 7 and 8. Following this developmental performance, the team hopes to have an official full premiere within the next two seasons and then tour the work.
The project is a Princeton Humanities Council Magic Project funded through a David A. Garner ’69 Magic Grant awarded to Araoz. The work has also received funding from The Henagan Foundation, support through the residency at Coffey Street Studios, and contributions from a number of individuals.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
